Call me childish, but I love all the nonsense - the snow, the trees, the tinsel, the turkey. I love presents. I love carols and cheesy songs. I just love Christmas™.
0:00 - 0:04
Blackness. Slow, laboured breathing extends into a death rattle.
V/O, female: ‘We lost the world.’
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0:05 - 0:09
Series of fixed-camera shots of cities destroyed and deserted. The images intersperse with close-ups of wounds and dead flesh.
V/O: 'To the dead.’
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0:10 - 0:13
An overgrown yard crowded with shambling, rotting corpses.
At the farthest corner of the lot, something hidden in the undergrowth snatches a zombie out of sight.
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0:14 - 0:16
Young man (Y) runs through the charred remains of an art gallery. A mob of bloody dead run after him.
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0:17
Blackness. Sound of wet explosion.
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0:18
Y has turned, is staring at a swamp of decaying blood, all that is left of his pursuers.
V/O: 'We’re all prey to something.’
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Construction of ‘separation fence’ aka 'West Bank Barrier’ aka Apartheid Wall begins.
……….
Wall provides blessed safety for refugees from snarling mayhem.
……….
Running at the wall.
……….
Running at the wall.
‘I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.’
'Of what?’
'Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.’
‘You have to identify those neighbourhoods where you want to concentrate your population … We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.’
Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking revelations must mean fresh scrutiny of those who have held him.
How could it not? What kind of power, after all, would deliberately starve even the youngest captives, according to chillingly cynical calorifico-political calculation, as a matter of publicly stated policy?
Butter. Because natives won’t exterminate themselves.
Delicious jam:
Gaddafi himself has on occasion cut a rather comical figure, with his eccentric dress sense and insistence on greeting dignatories in a desert tent…
…the eccentric colonel, where some wonder if he may now make his last stand. There he would hold court in a huge Bedouin tent…
…eccentric tendencies. He dressed flamboyantly, insisted on sleeping in a Bedouin tent…
…the eccentric despot… In the center of the complex, surrounded by lush vegetation, stood Gadhafi’s Bedouin tent…
Gaddafi himself, when he wasn’t the dramatic figure of iconic evil, was a murderous eccentric who pitched his tent in the gardens of the Elysée…
Shit:
A letter from an MI6 official to Mr Koussa stated “No 10 are keen that the Prime Minister meet the Leader in the tent. I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”
More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers.
The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?“
Kudos indeed by the way for not sounding gross, &, yes, what about our pain? Which of us White Folk has not long been strung out by our obligation to wonder whether brown people want to ostentatiously kill Jews?
(Jacobson does always speak for victims. Recall his wise intervention about the flotilla hellbent & merciless in its intent to deliver letters to Gaza. With Alice Walker yammering on about Palestinian children, what, insisted Jacobson, of the real victims, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers? Bringing mail, or in Jacobsonian idiom, ‘a cargo of intention … freighted with political sympathy and attitude’, would have been 'a provocation’, the flotilla 'half inviting a violence’. They were, to put it another way, asking for it. How refreshingly Jacobson cut through the cant, Walker’s 'language of outraged moral purity’, her delight in 'feeling good about herself’. & snap to you too, Hedy Epstein! You & Hajo Meyer. All Holocaust-survivor this, unarmed-civilian-that, solidarity-against-oppression the other. Such fucking drama queens.)
Anyway, you know Asians? Isn’t it brilliant that we’re not forced to assume they’re terrorist Jew-killers any more? That was some tiring shit right there.
Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.
Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.
Of course it would be pigs.
(Parenthetically, just as a muttered aside, pootling around online, swallowing bile, following links to those who, popping the collars on their threadbare contrarianism, foppishly defend primetime white supremacism, one grows tempted - sorely fucking tempted - to articulate a position whereby hate for them is the indispensable political grundnorm. But we must keep perspective. It would be a waste of time, a dereliction. If one man in particular were to demand attention, on that & many occasions, by the toddler’s method of screaming & smearing himself with shit, he would be a vacuity, a swaggering irrelevance, a malefic clown, a bleating pantomime sidekick spite-monger. He would have no agency, would be flotsam tossed as mindless as bladderwrack in & by the choppy froth of reaction. He would be a function of Evil at its very laziest, its least imaginative. Or as if, rather ironically, the result of industrial action in Hell, extruded from the vats by devils on a work-to-rule. For these reasons, rejectamentalist manifesto would never pay such a one any mind.)
There has been universal condemnation of David Starkey’s extraordinary outburst on Newsnight, in which he blamed Jews, or ‘a culture of Jewry’, for Britain’s woes.
'I’ve just been rereading Julius Streicher. … His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. … But it wasn’t Jew-on-Gentile violence. … What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs … have become Jews. The Gentiles have become Jews. A particular sort of conniving, secretive, nihilistic usurious culture has become the fashion. And Gentile and Jew, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Eastern European Yiddish that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country. …. It’s not blood, it’s cultural. … Listen to David Miliband, an archetypal successful Jew. If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was Christian.’
It is uncontroversial of course that such explicitly racist statements are beyond the pale. The fascist right is delighted, but no mainstream commentators have anything but condemnation for these remarks.
Oh wait, my bad.
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.
The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one does not speak of it at table. Insinuations that multiculturalism is to blame feel a little oblique. Insistences that yeah but still Islam is the enemy have the whiff of fire-fighting.
We’ve come to a pretty pass if court experts are going to allow bagatelles like irrefutable proof that they are talking bullshit to undermine the baiting on which their livelihoods depend. Fortunately, we can build on by far the most ambitious of the rhetorical strategies deployed in rearguard defence against the terrorist’s white Christianness: the impressively ex nihilo insistence that the Muslim-hating fascist learned his craft from Muslims, ’adopted the language’ of jihad. In fact the perfidy is worse even than that.
Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?
Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.
The earth elemental manifested in a form combining indolence & destruction. Even its evicted victim had to say well played.
Static, or what scientists term ‘poised’, fire.
In the pugilist science created to beat up the air, kerchiefs loosely tied serve roughly the same purpose as boxing gloves. Injuries to the fists are, nonetheless, common.
The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is ‘paved with gold’ is bastardised gibberish of course; but it is a folk-memory of alchemico-urban aspiration. Sufficient footfall does render a surface potent. Streets become alembics. Most matter remains stubbornly not-gold, but minor alterations are feasible. Dead favourites, for example, become jewels.
An Algerian man’s Bad Sexism precludes him from qualifying for French citizenship. ’[H]is idea of sexual equality is not that of the republic’. Hurrah for the French state! One feels certain this man’s sexism had a kind of Muslimness to it, rather than displaying any fidelity to long-protected Republican traditions of ’machismo … sexual predat[ion] … salacious remarks … paternalism … infantilization … aggression … male domination … & phallocracy’. One feels sure that were he to sexually assault a domestic worker, for example, he would do so with a complete lack of any suave Gallic élan.
many places where, during the night, that thing slouching, inevitably, towards Bethlehem, rested en route, leaned on mesh that at a squint has something of the hammock or trampoline about it, leaving what-rough-beast impressions as if invisible trees have fallen
Most irritating of all after the interventions of knights is the debris of the defeated.
This city is a fucking scree of dead parts.
If our spans, like antique notebooks’, were contained by endpapers! Two, three days before a baby is born, a great flat page appearing in the prepared room, by the crib, silent, intently examined by parents-to-be. They strive to parse patterns. They might smile guardedly at gilt filigrees & pleasing coloured stock, wince at ogees or particular paisleys, seeing troubled adolescence.
Much mottled, that paper to appear again, graveside.